housewife, Calvinist, libertarian and theonomist discussing what is interesting and important to me

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Vitriol From Pro-vacs

It is common when there is an outbreak of so-called "vaccine preventable diseases" that there will be news articles attempting to shame those who choose not to vaccinate themselves or their children. Actually, they really only get upset with those who won't vaccinate their children because Nazis people just love to tell others how to raise their children or have the government force parents to do what the Nazis people want. Rarely do I see a call for adults to get themselves vaccinated because it violates the liberal mantra to interfere with the "choice" of an adult. Anyway, this article from The New York Times is a classic example. It was stimulated by the resent outbreak of measles in Ohio.

The text of the article itself is entirely predictable and not noteworthy. What was shocking to me were the comments. There are comments that stop just short of advocating violence against parents who don't vaccinate. The common theme is that unvaccinated children should live their entire lives under quarantine inside of their homes. The humorous comments are the ones that start out with, "I was vaccinated against X and still got X... " which then go on to talk about how all children should be forced to get vaccinated. Huh? And it seems as though big pharma has succeeded in convincing a great number of people that measles is deadly.

This is disturbing, of course. But what frustrates me more is that at the same time that these people are accusing anti-vacs like me of getting my information from Jenny McCarthy and not being able to do my own research and not knowing any facts about disease or vaccines, they remain blissfully (or in this case angrily) unaware that over a single 12 year period in the United States only 4 people died of measles. None of them were children. Nearly all of the "victims" of the current Ohio outbreak of measles are adults.

Predictably, there was one pro-vac commenter who stated that big pharma can't use double blind studies to prove the safety and efficacy of vaccines because it would unethical. I guess it is more ethical to simply start giving the vaccinations and use everyone as test subjects?